Supreme Court strikes down Defense of Marriage Act in estate tax case

The Supreme Court, in a 5–4 decision written by Justice Anthony
Kennedy, ruled that the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), P.L. 104-199,
is unconstitutional because it violates the Fifth Amendment’s Due
Process Clause by denying equal protection to same-sex couples who are
lawfully married in their states (Windsor, No. 12-307 (U.S.
2013)).

The decision affirms two lower court rulings holding that DOMA
unconstitutionally denied Edith Windsor, a resident of New York state,
the right to take advantage of the exemption from federal estate taxes
on her wife’s estate that she would have been entitled to had DOMA not
prevented her marital status from being recognized federally. New York
state recognizes full marriage rights for same-sex couples.

Kennedy found that DOMA burdened the lives of same-sex married
couples “in visible and public ways,” by, for example, preventing them
from obtaining government health care benefits and from being buried
together in veterans' cemeteries (slip op. at 23). Kennedy wrote that
the states have, since the nation’s founding, possessed full power
over the subject of marriage and divorce, subject to constitutional
limitations (citing Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967))
(slip op. at 16). DOMA, which affects more than 1,000 federal statutes
in which the definition of marriage is at issue, interferes with
states’ power to regulate marriage by forcing “same-sex couples to
live as married for the purpose of state law but unmarried for the
purpose of federal law, thus diminishing the stability and
predictability of basic personal relations the State has found it
proper to acknowledge and protect” (slip op. at 22).

Before deciding that DOMA is unconstitutional, Kennedy addressed
whether the Court had jurisdiction to hear the case once the Obama
administration decided not to defend the law. Among other reasons to
conclude that jurisdiction was warranted was that Windsor, who had
been forced to pay the federal government $363,053 in estate taxes
when her wife died, had not received a refund of the money even though
the government was not defending the law.

Justice Antonin Scalia, in a dissent joined by Justice Clarence
Thomas (Chief Justice John Roberts joined the first part), objected to
the majority’s conclusion that the Court had jurisdiction, arguing
that because Windsor had won in the lower courts and the government
did not support DOMA, there was no controversy to decide.

DOMA, which was enacted in 1996, defines marriage for federal law
purposes as the legal union of one man and one woman. Under Section 3
of DOMA, same-sex marriage is not recognized for any federal purposes
including insurance benefits, Social Security benefits, the filing of
joint tax returns, and the unlimited marital estate tax exemption
available to opposite-sex married couples.

Lower federal courts had found Section 3 of DOMA to be
unconstitutional. The First Circuit declared Section 3 of DOMA
unconstitutional last year, upholding a district court decision
(Massachusetts v. United States Dep’t of Health and Human
Servs., 682 F.3d 1 (1st Cir. 2012)). The First Circuit held that
DOMA’s denial of federal benefits to same-sex couples lawfully married
in Massachusetts violates the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S.
Constitution.

In Windsor, the U.S. District Court for the Southern
District of New York held that Section 3 of DOMA unconstitutionally
discriminates against same-sex couples, and the Second Circuit
affirmed the decision (Windsor, 833 F. Supp. 2d 394 (S.D.N.Y.
2012), aff’d., 699 F.3d 169 (2d Cir. 2012)).

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